Over the past two decades, states under Republican control have enacted hundreds of restrictive and sometimes invasive laws (such as those forcing women seeking abortions to undergo ultrasounds) designed to make it as difficult and unpleasant as possible to obtain abortions. Abortion opponents pivoted, recruiting conservative lawmakers to take up the cause by pushing the limits of Roe. These cases, Ziegler says, “test” the limits of the act. Ten of them were indicted for violating the FACE Act-the first such charge during Trump’s presidency. In May 2017, a small group of activists was arrested after blockading the entrance of Kentucky’s last remaining abortion clinic. In 2017, the National Abortion Federation documented a sharp increase in trespassing and obstruction at its member clinics, as well as nearly double the number of threats of violence against doctors and staff compared with 2016. The strategy of targeting abortion clinics has also made a comeback since President Donald Trump took office. With its militant wing indelibly tied to murder, the rescue movement was all but dead by 1995. (An anti-abortion activist shot and killed Tiller in 2009.) In 1994, Congress responded to the mayhem with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which made interfering with clinics a crime. Two years later, an abortion doctor was murdered during a clinic protest in Pensacola, Florida. The protesters flung themselves under vehicles to prevent them from entering clinic parking lots federal marshals were deployed to keep the clinics open. For six weeks, thousands of activists descended on Wichita, Kansas, where one of only a few doctors who performed abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy, George Tiller, worked. Their offensive culminated in 1991, during the so-called Summer of Mercy, organized by Operation Rescue and its leader Randall Terry. Miller became a leader of the “rescue” movement of the ’80s and ’90s, which staged elaborate protests in which pro-life activists “saved” countless babies by means of more than 500 clinic blockades and 31,000 arrests. She joined a radical group that used tactics like chaining protesters to clinic doors and pouring glue into the locks. Miller, now 65, came of age at the height of the anti-abortion movement’s backlash against Roe v. This was a tried-and-true routine for Miller, a lifelong anti-abortion radical who sees her rap sheet as a badge of honor. She was charged with trespass and obstructing a police officer. Miller was carried outside, where, along with four others, she was arrested. When the police arrived, Miller and the small group of Christian pro-life activists she was leading went limp on the floor. Some of the clients were shuffled into a back room one left. Miller pushed past the receptionist, entered the waiting room, and began handing the clinic’s clients red roses with tags promising to help each woman “rediscover her own and her baby’s unique dignity.” When Miller came through the entrance, the abortion clinic’s staff asked her to leave. Before marching into the women’s health clinic in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan, on a freezing day last December, Monica Migliorino Miller and her compatriots paused to ask God to soften the hearts of the women inside to be open to their message.
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